Warranty claims can kill any competitive advantage in being first to market and scar a brand beyond redemption.

One of the biggest benefits in Qualmark technology is that it can radically reduce design and verification cycles and help customers deliver a more reliable product to market faster. Qualmark’s COE team has a very successful track record in (and thrives on) helping customers realize their goals for getting new, highly reliable product to the marketplace before the competition.

SUCCESS PROFILE: Mega-Sized LCD Television Monitors

Production of LCD television monitors was still in its infancy with mounting consumer demand for very large screens when Qualmark’s COE was engaged to help provide solutions for one of the world ’s preeminent producers of flat panel TV’s.

This Asian-based customer was an established leader in a number of other consumer electronics areas and understood very well the financial advantage for the first to market with a reliable, large screen TV for household use. A successful launch in the consumer arena would provide a rapid development path for larger, industrial-use LCD monitors.

The challenge for this manufacturer was pre-launch design reliability testing. Size, tolerance limits of the screen component and functional testing of multiplexed subsystems inhibited the ability of traditional testing approaches to provide meaningful insights.

Working alongside the customer’s product development experts the COE team:

• Developed a Highly Accelerated Life Test (HALT) plan which overcame the technological test limits of the monitor to enable effective testing of the screen’s functional instruments
• Devised specialized test fixturing that allowed for rigorous, informative testing of the monitor’s components
• Delivered a custom-designed large scale test system to the customer’s Asian location in 8 weeks

RESULTS: The outcome of the project was that the process developed by COE quickly exposed numerous weak links in product design that had been missed by other test approaches. Analysis revealed that many of the failures would have severely compromised product performance if left unaddressed, creating substantial warranty claims and unforeseen financial hazards for the customer. Qualmark’s COE team was able to overcome the reliability testing challenges for this manufacturer that allowed early and highly successful product launch.

This manufacturer extended the benefits of its COE experience, implementing an accelerated stress testing program in-house and maximizing the Qualmark system investment to benefit other product lines. Today, the solutions provided by Qualmark COE have been deployed throughout the organization with Qualmark technology and COE-directed test programs implemented in every division.

The Return on Investment (ROI) from Qualmark COE solutions is proving to be quite substantial.